Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community Engagement in a Master-Planned Development

The introduction of new media and information and communication technology enables a greater variety of formats and content beyond conventional texts in the application and discourse of public history projects. Multimedia and personalised content requires public historians and cultural community developers to grasp new skills and methods to make representations of and contributions to a collective community memory visible. This paper explores the challenge of broadening and reinvigorating the traditional role of the public historian working with communities via the facilitation, curation and mediation of digital content in order to foster creative expression in a residential urban development. It seeks to better understand the role of locally produced and locally relevant content, such as personal and community images and narratives, in the establishment of meaningful social networks of urban residents. The paper discusses the use of digital storytelling and outlines the development of a new community engagement application we call History Lines

Merging Special Collections with GIS Technology to Enhance the User Experience

This analysis evaluates how PhillyHistory.org merged their unique special collection materials with geospatial-based progressive technology to challenge and educate the global community. A new generation of technologically savvy researchers has emerged that expect a more enhanced user experience than earlier generations. To meet these needs, collection managers are collaborating with community and local institutions to increase online access to materials; mixing best metadata practices with custom elements to create map mashups; and merging progressive GIS technology and geospatial based applications with their collections to enhance the user experience. The PhillyHistory.org website was analyzed to explore how they used various geospatial technology to create a new type of digital content management system based on geographical information and make their collections accessible via online software and mobile applications

NLP and the Humanities: The Revival of an Old Liaison

This paper presents an overview of some\ud emerging trends in the application of NLP\ud in the domain of the so-called Digital Humanities\ud and discusses the role and nature\ud of metadata, the annotation layer that is so\ud characteristic of documents that play a role\ud in the scholarly practises of the humanities.\ud It is explained how metadata are the\ud key to the added value of techniques such\ud as text and link mining, and an outline is\ud given of what measures could be taken to\ud increase the chances for a bright future for\ud the old ties between NLP and the humanities.\ud There is no data like metadata

Using Geographic Information Science to Map the Flight of the Regicides in Seventeenth- century New England

In mid-seventeenth century two of the judges who condemned King Charles I of England to death became regicide fugitives when his son came to the throne as Charles II. The two men fled to New England and eluded their Royalist pursuers for twenty years. I am attempting to track their travels and hideouts through standard historical research and, more recently, the use of Geographic Information Science (GIS), a form of digital mapping technology which organizes information in a geographical format by adding spatial coordinates to existing data to form a geodatabase. This article describes the application of GIS to test an eighteenth-century historian’s description of the regicides’ movements in Connecticut during the spring and summer of 1661

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Research, relativity and relevance : can universal truths answer local questions

It is a commonplace that the internet has led to a globalisation of informatics and that this has had beneficial effects in terms of standards and interoperability. However this necessary harmonisation has also led to a growing understanding that this positive trend has an in-built assumption that "one size fits all". The paper explores the importance of local and national research in addressing global issues and the appropriateness of local solutions and applications. It concludes that federal and collegial solutions are to be preferred to imperial solutions

Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Following the Roots of Oregon Wine

Terroir is a French term widely used in wine circles to mean “the taste of the place.” The terroir of Oregon wine combines environmental and human elements to produce distinguishing flavors and reveals the histories of grape growers and winemakers in the state. A new archive at Linfield College, the Oregon Wine History Archive (OWHA), collects that history and makes it available to researchers and the public. Library professionals Rachael Cristine Woody and Rich Schmidt tell the story of OWHA’s origins and mission, which is to document all aspects of the wine industry by collecting and preserving historical materials such as photographs, diaries, planting and tasting notes, wine recipes, legislative records, and even bottles of wine. Over a dozen wineries, vineyards, individuals, and organizations have contributed to the collection —many of the area’s winemakers are committed to ongoing contributions to document Oregon wine’s past, present, and future terroir

Editorial Introduction: The utility and futility of 'the nation' in histories of Aotearoa New Zealand.

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on New Zealand history, including one on interracial rape and sexual violence in the 1860s, one on postcolonial methodology and the historical concept of the British World, and one on Whanganui Māori claims to the Whanganui River